Two Australians dream of an iPhone bottle opener

David Gomez, 7th July 2011

You can do a lot of things with an iPhone, but you can’t use it to open a beer. Two heavy drinking Australians are working to change that.

According to Reuters, the two Australian entrepreneurs are working on a hard plastic case that fits over the iPhone and comes equipped with a slide-out bottle opener. Their name for this device is the "Opena".

"Basically, Australians are fairly heavy drinkers, as you may or may not know," said Melbourne-based Chris Peters, an industrial designer who developed the product with Rob Ward, a former toolmaker.

"We're always out at friends' houses and so on, and in some cases you may not have your keys on you... So we thought, why don't we attach a bottle opener to an iPhone case? We always have our phones on us."

The awesome Aussies used three simple rules to guide them in their quest to develop the iPhone accessory. First, the case has to be slim, second, there has to be no chance of the opener scratching the iPhone, and third, the opener has to work without putting any pressure on the phone. The beer-drinking engineers have come up with a prototype.

Their testing of the device runs through "the worst case scenario" where a friend has shaken up an unsuspecting victim’s beer and it foams over. In this test situation the case and the iPhone came out undamaged every time. That’s progress.

There were a few hiccups in the beginning, mostly because the prototypes were too weak, other than that things have gone smoothly for them. They have secured start-up funding through an Internet site that lets people contribute. It has allowed them to start selling the attachment within two weeks.

"The strangest thing that happened was when we were doing the filming for the video and we had a courier drop off a parcel," Peters said.

"He gave us some very unusual looks when we had about 20 open beers at seven in the morning."

Some people have expressed doubt about such a device on the pair’s Facebook page. They question putting an expensive phone so close to foamy beverage. But one quote from their Facebook page says it all.